


The One Exception

by cherryboxes



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst, Mutual Pining, Pre-Time Skip, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:29:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22393324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryboxes/pseuds/cherryboxes
Summary: Hilda has always done everything in her power in order to ensure that she never has to do any work at all.Unfortunately, however, she  also can't help herself from taking on the troubles of a certain, cute, blue-haired girl.
Relationships: Marianne von Edmund/Hilda Valentine Goneril
Comments: 2
Kudos: 44





	The One Exception

Stuck cleaning the library. Again.

Hilda sighs as loudly as she can and—rather, tactfully—makes a show of looking as miserable as possible. None of the nearby students so much even glance in her direction. Hilda clears her throat, waits a moment, then sighs again, channeling all of her inner Dimitri in order to look as tortured as possible.  
Finally, someone begins to walk towards her. Before Hilda has a chance to mentally pat herself on the back for a job-well-brooded, she recognizes the dark-green hair and well-defined jawline of Linhardt. Fantastic. She would have had better luck trying to guilt-trip Archbishop Rhea herself. 

“Oh! Linhardt! I-“ Hilda barely gets those three words out before Linhardt interrupts her with an obnoxious yawn and a dismissive wave.

“Sorry, can’t chat. I have a very important meeting to attend,” he lies, “See you whenever.”

Normally, Hilda wouldn’t hesitate to persist in her endeavor to never do any work, but Linhardt is a man after her own heart and she has to admit—she appreciates the lazy hustle. She glances around to see if there any other candidates around that she could try her hand at guilt-tripping, but, to her vast disappointment, most of the students have either left the library or show no interest in acknowledging Hilda’s existence. 

“Ugh, this sucks…” Hilda mumbles, staring at the piles of books scattered throughout the room. She begins to appreciate the laziness of Garreg Mach students less and less with each book she returns to the shelf. After about an hour of organizing and sorting books, Hilda decides to relax for a well-deserved break. One would think that students of a well-esteemed academy would know how to return books to their proper place on the shelf, but clearly that isn’t the case. 

“Um…Hilda?” a soft voice draws Hilda from her reverie that consisted of cursing the church for forcing her to do manual labor constantly.  
Hilda looks up and smiles upon seeing the familiar down-cast eyes of Marianne. Marianne shifts awkwardly from one foot to the other, holding a book tightly in one hand. From what Hilda can tell, it seems to be a book about the basics of equestrian caretaking. 

“Hey, Marianne! What’s up?” Hilda says, feeling grateful for the company of something other than a bunch of boring books and her own heretical thoughts. 

“Oh! I…uh…” Marianne looks down nervously at the book she’s holding. With the way she’s staring at the book, you would swear it committed some egregious war crime. “Um, I have this book, and I want to return it but…” She trails off and closes her eyes with a slight sigh.

“…you don’t remember where it goes?” Hilda finishes for her.

“Y-yes. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Don’t sweat it! Here, lemme see the book.” Hilda examines the book before placing it back on the shelf in a section that contains books about botanical and animal care. 

“Thank you, Hilda.” Marianne says, breathing a sigh of relief. “Um. Do you have to clean the library again?”

“Ugh! Yea, I do.” Finally! A chance to rant! “Marianne, you will NOT believe this. So, I’m sitting in the dining hall—literally minding my own business—when Seteth comes up to me and claims, and I quote, I’ve been ‘especially lazy lately’. Can you believe that?”

“Well…”

“I know right? Unbelievable!” Hilda throws her hands into the air dramatically. She thinks she sees a slight tug at the corners of Marianne’s lips, perhaps the formation of a small smile? “Anyways, he saddled me with cleaning the library in order to teach me some sort of lesson, I guess. So, here I am!”

“Do you need any help?” As soon as the words leave her mouth, visible regret spread across Marianne’s entire face. “Actually, I-I would probably just mess things up again.”  
Hilda thinks back to the last time she cleaned the library with Marianne. Utilizing her usual repertoire of complaints, smiles, and good-old manipulation, Hilda pushed her chore of organizing the library onto Marianne. She figured that someone so polite and proper would be quite capable of sorting books, but that assumption was proven to be very, very incorrect. When Hilda returned to the library, books were messily strewn across the floor, some of their pages horrifically crinkled, and all the shelves looked like they had been hit by a tornado with books—that weren’t even in the correct section—practically falling out of their spots. 

Hilda opens her mouth to politely decline Marianne’s offer for help (truly, a usually unfathomable thing for Hilda to even consider) when she remembers the look on Marianne’s face at the end of the library incident after Hilda showed her how to organize the books correctly. Marianne’s grey eyes that were always so vacant and filled with sadness were instead lit up with admiration and wonder, and the smile that appeared upon her face was enough to mesmerize anyone, enough to make anyone believe in hope for this broken world they lived in. Hilda can’t help admitting that she would do pretty much anything to see that smile again.

“I do need your help, Marie.” Hilda says with a smile of her own. “But I can handle all the work. What I really need is for someone to keep me company while I finish up.”

But I can handle all the work. Those words felt so foreign on Hilda’s tongue, but she didn’t regret saying them. In fact, she almost felt proud of herself for not guilt-tripping poor Marianne again.

“Sure. I can do that.” Marianne said after a moment. “Although, I’m probably not the best person to keep you company…”

“Are you kidding?” Hilda begins to slowly sort through the remaining books. “There’s nobody I’d rather be with!”

“You don’t mean that. I-I can barely keep up a conversation.”

“Marianne, I think that you’re a very interesting person. I always find myself thinking ‘I wonder what Marianne thinks about this?’ whenever Claude and Professor Byleth go over plans for a mission or like, when I’m even just eating at the dining hall,” Hilda says, and she means it. She wishes Marianne would speak her mind more often. “Here. How about you tell me about that book you were reading? Was it about horses?”

Bingo. “Horses” must be the magic word because Marianne instantly perks up and seems just about ready to rattle off the name of every horse breed on the continent.

“Y-yes! It was about how to take care of them,” Marianne closes her eyes, likely imagining herself in a field of flowers being blown by a gentle breeze while horses frolic around her, wild and free. Or, maybe that’s just what Hilda is imagining for her. Either way, it’s a beautiful sight. “It describes how to clean them and properly maintain hygiene as well as the different types of food that they can eat. It also talks about how to…um…form a bond with one.”

“Aw, Marie, that’s really cute! I didn’t know you were so interested in horses.”

A small smile plays across Marianne’s lips, and Hilda could swear she felt her heart stop beating for a second. While trying to figure out what that could possibly mean, Marianne spoke up again: “I…really like animals.” 

Hilda wonders if she should go see Professor Hanneman about having a critical heart condition because her heart feels like it’s beating straight out of her chest right now. Nah, getting a diagnosis and treatment from him would be too much trouble probably. 

“Oh, that doesn’t shock me one bit,” Hilda says once her heart palpations die down, “You seem like the kind of girl that could sing a sweet song and draw all kinds of animals to your side. Hey, maybe you could bring us a deer—we do need an official mascot.”

Marianne’s smile gets a little wider. “What would we do with a deer?”

“Easy! Name him Claude and pass him off as the next leader of the Leicester Alliance.” 

Marianne starts to laugh the most beautiful laugh that has ever fallen upon Hilda’s ears. Encouraged, Hilda continues.

“We could even give him a little Crest tattoo. We’ll copy Byleth’s so everyone knows to watch out for both our Professor and our mascot.”

Those were the wrong words to say. Upon hearing the word “Crest”, any trace of happiness instantly leaves Marianne’s expression, and she crosses her arms, withdrawing into herself. Now that she thinks about it, she can’t seem to recall what Marianne’s Crest even is. She assumed it was something rather innocuous, or something that would perhaps enhance her magic. The expression on Marianne’s face suggests that her Crest might be something else entirely—at the very least, the subject is a poor one for her. Marianne suddenly stands up from where she was sitting and makes it very clear with her darting eyes that she wants nothing more than to escape the conversation.

“Ah…sorry, Hilda, I think I just ended up distracting you…” Hila glances at the piles of books she still has left as Marianne says this. “I should really be going.”

“Oh, okay!” Hilda hesitates before saying, “I’m sorry if I said something to offend you, Marianne. Thank you for keeping me company.”

Marianne only nods slightly in response. As she begins to leave the library, though, she steps on a book laying dangerously in her path. Some annoying student probably left it there, probably Lorenz. Marianne gasps sharply as the book slides out from under her and she loses her footing. Hilda rushes over to her before Marianne lands roughly on the library’s wooden-floor and catches her just in time. Both girls simultaneously releasing the breath they were holding in. Hilda stares down into Marianne’s nervous, confused grey eyes, losing herself in them for a moment before laughing awkwardly.

“Hah, that could’ve been pretty bad. You okay, Marie?”

Instead of replying, Marianne’s pale face turns alarmingly red as she stares at Hilda’s arms.  
“A-a-arm…”

“Huh?”

“N-nothing!” Marianne quickly covers her mouth with her hands and jumps out of Hilda’s arms. “I’m s-s-so sorry!”

Before Hilda has a chance to say anything, Marianne practically sprints out of the room, her face burning a bright shade of red. Hilda stares blankly at her arms. They looked normal to her—she had rolled up her sleeves while working to clean the library, exposing her muscles. But it’s not like Marianne hasn’t seen those before when they worked together on the battlefield. Hilda shrugs off that interaction, instead thinking about Crests. She wonders if she could look up Marianne’s crest somewhere but stops when she considers how Marianne would react to Hilda digging around in her history. Hilda’s been spending too much time with Claude. Marianne will tell her in her own time—she can’t go poking around in other people’s business.  
Hilda turns her attention back to the seemingly endless piles of books she still has to organize when she suddenly spots someone else walk into the library.

“Oh, ouch!” Hilda exclaims suddenly and gingerly holds her side. “Ugh…how am I gonna finish all this work now?”  
The person rushes over to her side, proclaiming the sympathy and willingness to help her out. Hilda smiles as she limps out of the library—the person busily doing her work behind her. The ol’ fake-an-injury trick. Works like a charm.

**Author's Note:**

> hey, thanks for reading! this fic is going to be entirely pre-timeskip and will focus around Hilda helping Marianne with her past and her insecurities surrounding her Crest. maybe? also falling in love in the process?
> 
> anyway, i hope you enjoyed!


End file.
